


Valhalla, or what have you

by de_Clare



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Faeries - Freeform, Hookah, M/M, Older Man/Younger Man, Skinny Dipping, Trans Character, Trans Harry Potter, University of Cambridge - Freeform, Wizarding Universities (Harry Potter), may day, trans author, turkish delights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 20:14:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29159478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_Clare/pseuds/de_Clare
Summary: For May Day, St. Mab’s College in Cambridge hosts a Babylon-themed ball, complete with Amytis blossoms which inspire feelings of empathy. Smoking hookah and eating Turkish delights, Harry and Sirius realise that paradise is already inside us.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Harry Potter
Kudos: 10





	Valhalla, or what have you

May Day eve, a night of bonfires and rapturous gaiety, heralding the arrival of summer in her full garb. At an unassuming bend in the river Cam, where the water turns deep and turbid and owls woop over the still cattle fields, Queen Mab’s College, the wizarding affiliate to the University of Cambridge, is bedecked in Eastern splendor to rival a sultan’s lavish court. Smart-looking guests soar over the gatehouse on magic carpets, their liminal legality giving an extra frisson of decadence. 

The central court is bedecked like a desert oasis, with three-humped camels taking long-tongued draughts from students’ fruity libations and a paddling pool half-full of precociously pissed apprentices soaked up to the knots of their black ties. The garden is made up like the hanging gardens of Babylon, with animated animal topiaries roaming in the grass. A reedy Clydesdale stands three metres at the shoulder, grazing gently as the breeze blows through its whistling rushes.

In the hedged-in central garden, there emanates the organic hum of earth music, an amplified symphony of the descending roots, throbbing leaf veins and eddying river and somehow it all manages to be tonal, now like jazz and then like the bright heart of a mass setting. 

Two revelers gather around silver hookahs and delicate trays of Turkish delights, while the incense smell of magical Empathy rises from delicate pink bells of Amytis blossoms in the body wet grass. Though now synonymous in polite society with orientalist buggery, Empathy does just as it says. It flings wide the psychic portals between everyone in smelling distance. Strangely, the effect is not hallucinatory or sedating, but subtle. In fact, it’s not until leaving the garden having forgiven old lovers, reconciled feuding families and inspired untold altruism from wizarding business leaders, that anyone notices that there had been any effect at all.

Sirius led Harry inside with no more mystical preamble than, “Let’s smoke a hookah. I’ll teach you how to blow smoke rings” and Harry regales Sirius with the jolly japes of wizarding tertiary education.

“I asked a porter how they get the grass so flat. He said: you just roll it out. And you do that for about five hundred years.”

“Ha!” Sirius barks an eddy of crisp white vapor, the hookah hanging languidly from his fingertips. “They’re so dear about walking on the grass, but what about rolling on it?” he emphasises with a side tackle to Harry’s chest.

Instinctively, Harry seals his hand to the ground, hooks the other around Sirius’ knee and drives himself to the top with the strength of chest against chest. Sirius coughs and looks frankly alarmed, but then his face relaxes into a jovial smile.

“Not as young as I used to be, I’m afraid.”

Harry laughs, “Sorry.” The heat between them isn’t unwelcome, but he pulls back to let his godfather breathe.

He extends a hand, but Sirius handily rights himself and shakes the dew off of his dinner jacket. “Where did you learn how to grapple like that? Was that part of your combat training.”

“Nothing so impressive. My cousin used to practice take-downs on me, so I learned how to leverage from the bottom. Probably the only thing that kept me from being paraplegic by the time I got to school.” He tries to sound matter-of-fact, but the few years of relative peace in a better life have made him realise just how foul the Dursleys were. They probably think his annual Christmas cards are passive-aggressive. They’re probably right.

Sirius claps a firm hand on his shoulder, and squeezes the muscle underneath. A cloud of faeries waft by riding metallic blue dragonflies, luminescent and gentle. They settle in a sun-bright clump in the rumpled grass and set to straightening the battered grass blades where he and Sirius had scuffled. Their expressions are too minute for Harry’s eyes, but he’s certain that it’s judgmental. 

“Sour little wankers,” Sirius says, tipping half his champagne onto the grass. The clump of yellow light scatters in confusion, then leaps en masse into the puddle making Harry laugh like a giddy drunk. Sirius smiles, and takes a hearty gulp, “It’s not their fault, really. They like the foxgloves in formal gardens, but they prefer forests and wildflowers.”

“Then why do they come here?” Harry asks. He gropes around for his champagne glass, knocking it clumsily to the side. A sizeable chunk of the faeries disengage from the first puddle and descend on the new. As they whizz by Harry feels a tickling on his skin, as if the flush in his cheeks was beating tiny wings behind his eyes and on his lips. He’s not sure whether it’s alien or his own tingling aliveness.

Sirius stretches his back and lifts himself onto a plush handwoven Turkish kilim cushion of blue and orange and white stripes. A small detachment of faeries climb up Sirius’s wine coloured velvet dinner jacket and as they climb he straightens and sighs audibly. 

Seeing them so close they’re no longer than his little finger, and though together they glow an ethereal yellow, each one is its own color and shape. Some are covered in sleek scales, some are bulbous and twisted like ginger roots, one looks like a blind upright newt, but they’re all quite beautiful in a visceral way. 

“They’re bound to the land. They are the land, really.” Sirius continues, stretching out his hand and letting the faeries play inside his fingers. Harry remembers the smirking demon in Night of Bald Mountain VHS tape he’d watched as a child and laughs, though it doesn’t wholly shake off the sense of the uncanny. Internally, he becomes younger, laying on his side at Sirius’s feet watching the hookah coals glow iridescent and red. It’s something like he’d imagined a bed-time story would be, and he feels that deep, dull sadness and loss that now, free from immanent death and other distractions, he is at the age of nineteen finally feeling. But he wills the pain to rest with a breath, and listens to Sirius talk of faeries.

“In ancient times they rode bees to pollinate the flowers and carefully twined the tree roots together so they could communicate. Now they’ve become much like us. They ride the dragonflies because it looks flash and they lap up the drink all of you undergraduates generously spill on the grass.”

“That’s awful.” His college is millennia old and so weathered it feels like it was a part of the earth itself, but now he is suddenly conscious of sitting on a scarred, well-manicured landscape.

“Yes, but not to them. To them this is a season. They had a season of fire when the earth was a sea of lava. Then the ground cooled, and there was a season of rocks and seas and trees,” he says in the primordial sing-song of a children’s story, “Then a season of dinosaurs and spiders the size of quidditch quaffles. And now we’re here, but then we’ll be gone. On that timescale, it’s all actually quite amusing.”

Sirius takes Harry’s hand and flattens his palm facing the cloudy night sky. A triad of faeries skip from Sirius’s shoulder, plopping onto Harry’s palm with stealthy cat feet, the answering hum under his skin tingles in his fingertips. They hold invisibly tiny hands and dance in a weaving circle, bulbous faeries and bent faeries and svelte fareries and as they dance their light becomes brighter and brighter and Harry wonders whether the other revelers have noticed the sudden surge of energy—for one moment the light overpowers everything and within it he sees the curve of an androgynous mouth in a knowing, benevolent smile against a sheer infinite wall of white and for one moment he feels the lightness of a full field of action, decisions, consequences and their senselessness. 

He feels himself reaching to hold the moment, and just as quickly he’s back on the grass with few details, the faeries having ridden away and Sirius’s hands on his shoulders, apparently keeping him steady. Was he having a fit?

Harry sits up and sees the light catch in Sirius’ eyes. He never notices eyes, really, being partially colourblind. He’s terrified he’ll assume that they’re the wrong color. But it isn’t the colour that’s important but the light, like felicity seen from the outside. Harry looks and Sirius looks and neither feel any pull to look away in fear or shame, and it seems strange to have ever felt such an impulse. He wants to say, “I think I saw God,” but the concept is strangely foreign since his youth in Little Winging’s evangelical church with its drum set and kids who made fun of his ill-fitting clothes. But he just looks into Sirius’s eyes, at the micro folds at the corners, at his firm brow and wide mouth and he knows that it’s spoken somehow, what would make sense to Sirius and share the joy that Harry feels. But Sirius is already joyful, so there’s no need. It’s a free exchange that grows without tension…

“…Harry?”

“I’m looking a bit gormless, aren’t I?” But he can’t manage to fully self-deprecate, he’s too happy. He wants to relate what he saw, but he can’t speak, as if the image in his skin refuses abstraction into words.

“It’s a faery trick. They’re naturally luminescent, like fireflies, but the light is also empathogenic. They like to draw out human emotions to amuse themselves. All authentic mind you, just somewhat amplified. Then again, I suppose a late vintage sparkling would do the same.” Sirius smiles, and Harry sees a glimmer of his own inner world.

But part of him is concerned and feels somewhat wrong-footed and he asks “Is it only a trick? I think I saw—“

“Valhalla, yes, I know. Come sit up here.”

“How did you…” But Sirius helps him up from the grass to sit beside him on the cushion. The faeries don’t come this time, probably too pissed on champagne to bother.

“After we finished our NEWTs, your parents, Peter, Remus and me toured America together. In New Orleans, which is too humid and smells of wet towels in the summer by the way, we decided to explore Couturie forest at night. In the oak grove, mind you some of these oaks are eight hundred years old and twice as wide as they are high, we wandered into a clutch of tropical Empathy. This stuff,” he picks the delicate pink stem of an Amytis flower and inhales from the bud directly, which makes him sneeze hugely and smile like a maniac for a second before his expression softens. “As much as proper people say that this is a naughty Eastern indulgence, it’s as English as a rained-out picnic, and perhaps just as wet.” Harry must look sullen because Sirius says.

“Which is not to say that what you see and feel isn’t authentic and wonderful, but let me give you some context for it. The five of us wandered into this tropical Empathy spewing from these giant fuck-off purple flowers, and suddenly everything was just BRILLIANT. Your father went mad for how gorgeously ginger your mum was, and they ran off into the trees. And Peter, Remus and I talked about how we would never measure up to our fathers and when there was nothing else to say and it was too damned hot we took off our linens, giving the mosquitos quite the buffet. I sang Druidic hymns from my youth as a chorister and we danced with nothing but first quarter moonlight to cover us. And as I sang, I felt a burning in my ribs and knew it was the scratch Remus had given himself on the last full moon. And I felt tightness in my chest like I was hiding a fat stomach and I knew it was Peter’s shame. And I remember Peter stopped dancing and put both hands on my chest and said, “Your uncle shouldn’t have done that to you. The inheritance didn’t make up for it.” And Remus put his hand over Peter’s on my chest and said, ‘I love you too.’ 

“And Peter was happy for us, but we wanted to include him, so we all dissolved into a puddle on the ground. Sense was this feeling that the pretence had dropped away leaving only the blindingly obvious supported by all experience. Love is what’s important. When we woke up we all had mosquito bites on our asses and we said nothing, perhaps English enough to get intoxicated and spill our guts and equally English enough to not say a word about it. And perhaps what I’m trying to tell you is that it’s a wonderful thing to reach Nirvana or Elysium or what have you, but you have to be prepared to live that Elysium or spend a lifetime disappointed in the lie that you’re living.”

Harry sees the naked grief in Sirius and the words come out effortlessly, “So what you’re really telling me is not to make your mistakes.”

“Yes!” He throws his hands in the air, and Harry sees the inner curve of wrist and crisp white shirt cuff and dinner jacket and silently appreciates its beauty. 

“Right.” Harry dips his fingers into the pile of Turkish delights, tasting the soft sugar and full-bodied mallow fruit. Then he picks another off the tray and lifts it to Sirius, who lurches forward and, clamping Harry’s wrist, closes his mouth around sweet and fingers. He runs his tongue greedily between knuckles and finger-webs sucking up the gush of saliva that’s trickling down Harry’s palm.

It feels good, better than any physical experience he’s had in his life, not localized to any one spot or radiating directly to his genitals, but a rich full experience of his body and heart. There’s no reason not to love the man who broke out of prison for him, offered him a home and a new life, loved him and took him seriously and made him feel wanted. It’s all so simple to him now, the only struggle is how to say it, and the saying it is a question he’d buried long ago.

“Sirius, what was behind the Veil?”

Sirius releases Harry’s hand, but he puts his hands on his waist as if anchoring himself to Harry’s body. “Valhalla, Nirvana or what have you.”

“Then why did you come back?” Harry asks, remembering Sirius wandering naked out of the archway with ghostly pale, staring eyes. They’d all assumed he’d climbed back out of irretrievable darkness.

“In that place, well, it’s not a place properly speaking. Because it’s in us already, we just become weighed down by trivial things and forget. But in that state, there is no worry or sadness or wanting. I knew that those I loved would be fine and we would all reconcile in joy, and knowing this in some way we already had. But in my fullness I wanted to share this love and have it shine back. And so I came back. I’ve already loved you in another world, and I love you here. Now.”

And that is it. Everything that can be said is said and the moment is wide open. 

Harry unties his laces and kicks off his shoes and socks. Then begins at the zip of his trousers.

“What are you doing?” Sirius asks.

“Did they have a river in Valhalla or whatever it was?”

Sirius smiles rakishly. “Right.” He peels off his dinner jacket and begins working on the sleeves. “You’re not doing this alone.”

They undress quickly and once he’s starkers and Sirius is still working on his shoes, Harry shoots up and says, “Let’s Go!”

He runs naked past a group of far-gone revelers, slips on the bank and falls headlong into the river. 

Sirius is not far behind, one shoe and sock still clinging on, diving in with a loud, slapping splash.

“Merlin, Mordred and Mim, that’s freezing!” Sirius shouts.

“Wish you hadn’t left your wand with your clothes,” Harry teases, mercilessly. “Come here.”

Harry swims closer, wondering absently whether grindylows live at the bottom. It might be fun to fight off a school of them with Sirius. 

Their bodies touch underwater with a curious rubbery numbness, but their breaths above the water are warm and visible.

“Here’s something I learned in Azkaban.”

Under the water, Sirius extends a hand to Harry’s chest. When the palm makes contact, it’s warm and settles into his skin like the gentle flush of whisky. As he treads water, he touches Harry’s back and belly and buttocks and genitals then dives underwater to smear the palpable warmth over his legs down to his toes.

“Wandless magic. I learned that if I put myself in the mind of a dog, I could manipulate spells without the dementors catching on. I might have died of consumption otherwise.”

Harry smiles, perhaps it’s the moment to tell him. He dives under the water and works a smoldering warmth between his fingers. Yes, it is possible. Then he rubs the warmth from Sirius’s rough heels to his thighs, the hair on the small of his back.

And when he surfaces for air, Sirius is looking at him with awe, which he never expected and feels himself blush.

“But you’re not an animagus.”

“I am, and I changed forms.”

“What are you?”

“A human. A woman, really.”

“The mother…but that means…”

Seizing the moment, Harry lunges forward to catch Sirius’s mouth with his own, kissing until they both skink and inhale water.  
“I know, great dangers and great adventures to come. But you’ve just told me you’ve already been to the place beyond time where everything’s already happened. So as I see it, I’ve already done the hard work, and I’ve earned a laugh in the river with my godfather, the great Dante Alighieri—“

Sirius opens his mouth as if to contradict, but then sees Harry’s glee at baiting him and by then has sunk in the river again and is vigorously spitting out river water.

“How about the two of us go on an adventure, unravel this mystery of the earth mother animagus, fight off some baddies, make love and carve out a piece of Valhalla on this earth. Then we can spend eternity in existential bliss.” 

“Deal.” Sirius casts a wide bubble head charm and they sink beneath the surface of the river. Tiny fish scatter beneath them and artifacts of centuries of student debauchery are tangled in the seabed landscape. As the Pleiades rises over the morning horizon, they touch lips with such gentle knowing that a modular universe burgeons forth like the cone from an ancient tree with love as its sky and sea and air.

**Author's Note:**

> A/N I think the end note about the goddess needs more introduction, but until I get a better feel for what kind of world I’m building, I’ve left it this way.
> 
> Also, if you can’t tell, this story was inspired by taking MDMA. It gave me new insights into my priorities and how easy it is to get weighed-down by trivialities.


End file.
